Vitalik Buterin Compares Bitcoin and Ethereum: BTC is Like a Calculator, ETH is Like a Smartphone

03-03-2019

For Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, his project holds many advantages over Bitcoin, and he proudly illustrates with simple words why his "second generation blockchain" has enough merits to be the most important altcoin in the global marketcap.

ETH: A Project Born As An Evolution of BTC

In an interview for Business Insider, the mastermind behind ETH explained that he was initially quite involved in the Bitcoin community. Over a period of about two years, he not only began to actively participate in the community but also engaged in various crypto-related projects until he eventually left the university to become fully involved in activities related to the development of blockchain technologies.

He later realized that Bitcoin could evolve. He began to study the possibility to expand the capabilities of Bitcoin but eventually decided to take one step further, developing a new, more efficient blockchain. The evolution that began with the Ethereum project opened a framework of options for users in the same way that smartphones changed the way society behaves.

"Soon after (dropping the university) I started to realize there were a lot more interesting things that you could do with blockchains than just a single peer to peer currency. And it was something that other people were starting to recognize at the same time.

I came up with the idea behind Ethereum, this idea that blockchain was a built-in programming language as kind of what I thought was the simplest and most logical way to actually build a platform that can be used for many more kinds of applications".

BTC is a Calculator, ETH is a Smartphone

The creator of ETH compared the differences between both blockchains as the ones of a pocket calculator vs. a Smartphone. While BTC can do one thing very well, ETH -being Turing complete- gives users and developers a broader framework of possibilities thanks to Smart contracts and dApps:

"Think of the difference between something like a pocket calculator and a smartphone, where a pocket calculator does one thing, and it does one thing well. But really, people want to do all these other things. And if you have a smartphone, then you have a pocket calculator as an app, you have a music player as an app, you have a web browser as an app, and pretty much everything else.

So basically, taking that same kind of idea of increasing the power of the system by making it more general purpose and applying it to blockchains."

Ethereum was recently able to implement its Constantinople hard fork, a previously elusive milestone. This achievement begins the path to ETH 2.0 and could be the first step to accomplish a scalable, fast and efficient blockchain, with the capacity to process up to 1 million TPS.